Abortion, Gaza, and the entryists

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APTOPIX Israel Palestinians
Rockets are fired toward Israel from the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel, Monday, Oct. 23, 2023. Ariel Schalit/AP

Abortion, Gaza, and the entryists

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There’s a post going around featuring a picture of protesters at an anti-Israel rally carrying a banner that reads, “Reproductive Justice means Free Palestine.”

Above the photo, the X account @EndWokeness asks, “What does this even mean?”

HAMAS IS THE WORST ENEMY OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE

And it is true, the sign on its face makes no sense.

If Gaza became a Palestinian state, would that somehow help women here in America gain “reproductive justice”? Hard to see how that is possible. Would it mean women in Gaza would gain “reproductive justice”? That’s definitely impossible as abortion is not legal in any Arab or Muslim country.

So who wrote this sign, why, and what message are they trying to convey?

The answers can be found in an essay by Hamilton College history professor Maurice Isserman published in the Nation.

Isserman’s essay, titled “Why I Just Quit DSA,” explains how what he calls “entryists” infiltrated the Democratic Socialists of America and captured the organization. Or, as Isserman describes it, “What do I mean by ‘entryists’? In left-wing parlance, the term refers to tightly organized groups who, without sharing the beliefs of larger and more loosely organized bodies, join and proceed to either wreck or, where possible, capture them for ends at odds with the spirit and purpose of the original members.”

Isserman then recounts how DSA was founded decades ago by Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich, two writers/activists (Harrington wrote The Other America: Poverty in the United States, and Ehrenreich authored Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America). Harrington and Ehrenreich were both leftists, even describing themselves as socialists, but they were also devoted to, what Harrington calls, “the left wing of the possible.”

For years DSA was a small organization few cared about until the popularity of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign grew the organization from 6,000 to 90,000. At that point, the entryists saw a large, unorganized organization that could be hijacked for their own far more radical purposes.

And here is where the issue of Gaza comes into play. “As the new hard-line caucuses gained influence, the issue of Palestine became ever more important in DSA’s internal political culture. … Concern for Palestine, entirely legitimate in itself, also served other purposes for DSA’s new sectarian leadership, furnishing a convenient stick to beat DSA’s moderate wing if it wasn’t willing to embrace the most extreme positions on the Palestinian question – up to and including denying Israel’s right to continued existence.”

“For the sectarians, discrediting elected DSAers who fail that test helps to move the organization closer to the desired break with the Democratic Party.”

With these insights, we can now answer the questions of who wrote the sign, why, and what message they were trying to convey.

The sign was written by “entryists” who want to discredit more moderate elements of the progressive movement. The sign was written to communicate to those who already support abortion that if they want to participate in the progressive movement, they also have to support the end of Israel too.

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The support of Hamas was too far for Isserman to go. “An organization that can’t take a stand condemning a right-wing terrorist group that set out to murder as many Jewish civilians, including children and infants, as it can lay its hands on, has forfeited the right to call itself democratic socialist,” Isserman writes.

Although maybe a movement predisposed to abortion is more comfortable with the killing of infants than Isserman thought.

© 2023 Washington Examiner

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